The leftwing Inter Press Service (“Journalism and Communication for Global Change!”) is peddling an anti-US propaganda meme, which ignorant leftist blogs like Think Progress are eager to lap up.

The reality is that blackwater fever is a term for a commonly fatal and very long known complication of malaria, hemoglobinuria, a condition in which the destruction of red blood cells by the malaria parasites floods the victim’s urine with hemoglobin, causing it to appear dark-red or black, producing the name “blackwater fever.”

Iraqi doctors in al-Anbar province warn of a new disease they call “Blackwater” that threatens the lives of thousands. The disease is named after Blackwater Worldwide, the U.S. mercenary company operating in Iraq.

“This disease is a severe form of malarial infection caused by the parasite plasmodium falciparum, which is considered the worst type of malarial infection,” Dr. Ali Hakki from Fallujah told IPS. “It is one of the complications of that infection, and not the ordinary picture of the disease. Because of its frequent and severe complications, such as Blackwater fever, and its resistance to treatment, P. falciparum can cause death within 24 hours.”

Is it possible? Here’s the New York Times actually reporting without derision scientific questioning of the responsibility of Anthropogenic Global Warming for an observed instance of change in the natural world.

In the scientific equivalent of the board game Clue, teams of biologists have been sifting spotty evidence and pointing to various culprits in the widespread vanishing of harlequin frogs.

The amphibians, of the genus Atelopus — actually toads despite their common name — once hopped in great numbers along stream banks on misty slopes from the Andes to Costa Rica. After 20 years of die-offs, they are listed as critically endangered by conservation groups and are mainly seen in zoos.

It looked as if one research team was a winner in 2006 when global warming was identified as the “trigger” in the extinctions by the authors of a much-cited paper in Nature. The researchers said they had found a clear link between unusually warm years and the vanishing of mountainside frog populations.

The “bullet,” the researchers said, appeared to be a chytrid fungus that has attacked amphibian populations in many parts of the world but thrives best in particular climate conditions. …

Other researchers have been questioning that connection. Last year, two short responses in Nature questioned facets of the 2006 paper. In the journal, Dr. Pounds and his team said the new analyses in fact backed their view that “global warming contributes to the present amphibian crisis,” but avoided language saying it was “a key factor,” as they wrote in 2006.

Now, in the March 25 issue of PLoS Biology, another team argues that the die-offs of harlequins and some other amphibians reflect the spread and repeated introductions of the chytrid fungus. They question the analysis linking the disappearances to climate change. …

“There is so much we still do not know!” David B. Wake, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail note after reading the new paper. The origin of the fungus and the way it kills amphibians remain unknown, he said, and there are ample mysteries about why it breaks out in certain places and times and not others.

Ah! but here we go, wait for it, here comes the Times’ conclusion:

Ross A. Alford, a tropical biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, said such scientific tussles, while important, could be a distraction, particularly when considering the uncertain risks attending global warming.

“Arguing about whether we can or cannot already see the effects,” he said, “is like sitting in a house soaked in gasoline, having just dropped a lit match, and arguing about whether we can actually see the flames yet, while waiting to see if maybe it might go out on its own.”

AP (employer of terrorist photographers) gleefully reports:

– A roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers in Baghdad on Sunday, the military said, pushing the overall American death toll in the five-year war to at least 4,000.

It’s sad, of course, that 4000 American soldiers lost their lives over the course of five years in Iraq, but… the casualties entailed by current US military operations are, in fact, very small compared to losses in countless individual battles in previous wars. Grant lost 7000 men in twenty minutes at Cold Harbor, June 3, 1864, at a time when the US population was roughly one tenth the size of today’s. Imagine 70,000 casualties in twenty minutes.

In WWII, the Battle of Iwo Jima lasted under six weeks, not five years, and the US conquest of that small island cost 7000 Americans lives.

source: Congresssional Report

THE MSM (example: New York Times) pounced when, on a recent trip to the Middle East, in Amman Jordan, Senator John McCain heretically spoke of Iran providing training and financing for al Qaeda.

Thomas Joscelyn debunks the well-known liberal meme about how it’s absolutely impossible for Shiites and Sunni to make common cause against unbelievers.

• Earlier this month, the U.S. military and the current head of Iraqi intelligence reported that Iran has been targeting al Qaeda’s enemies–not al Qaeda itself–inside Iraq. There have also been a number of reports on Iran’s support for al Qaeda in Iraq. The Kurds have routinely complained about Iran’s support for al Qaeda’s affiliate, Ansar al-Islam. For more on Ansar al-Islam’s ties to Iran, and other bad actors, see Dan Darling’s excellent primer. As Darling wrote: “Another apparent relationship exists between Ansar and radical elements of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which seeks to use Ansar as a proxy force against the Coalition in Iraq.”

• More generally, the theological differences between Iran and al Qaeda have never been a serious impediment to cooperation. For example, I wrote a lengthy essay on the topic of Iran’s cooperation with al Qaeda going back to the early 1990’s. And in a recent piece, I detailed the evidence cooperation between Iran’s chief terrorist, the late Imad Mugniyah, and al Qaeda.

• The 9-11 Commission found extensive evidence of collaboration between Iran and al Qaeda. For example, the Commission concluded (p. 61): “The relationship between al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations.”

• The Clinton administration recognized the relationship between al Qaeda, Iran, and Iran’s terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. Here is, in part, what the Clinton administration charged in its indictment of al Qaeda following the August 1998 embassy bombings: “USAMA BIN LADEN, the defendant, and al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with representatives of the government of Iran, and its associated terrorist group Hizballah, for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.”

• The mainstream media, including the Washington Post itself, has reported on Iran’s ties to al Qaeda. But now a blog hosted by the Washington Post dismisses the idea that the two could collaborate.

John McCain was right the first time. He shouldn’t have taken his comment back. But this whole imbroglio shows just how much ignorance there is concerning our terrorist enemies.

Richard Miniter, at PJM, tells you what the MSM will not about the scope, details, and omissions of the Institute for Defense Analysis study whose recently leaked executive summary was widely reported to have shown that there was “no connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.”

Miniter provides considerable details on Iraqi officials’ meetings with al Qaeda, Iraqi funding of al Qaeda affilates, Iraqi provided training, and al Qaeda personnel carrying Iraqi passports or obtaining refuge in Iraq.

Pro-Clinton Kos Kid Alegre declared herself on strike from Daily Kos, frustrated at management’s refusal to enforce standards of civility or factuality with respect to postings attacking Hillary.

Gateway Pundit offers a screen capture of a portion of the flung feces representing the typical negative response the Kos community.

Kos himself was unsympathetic. He told ABC’s Jake Tapper:

First, these people should read up on the definition of ‘strike.’ What they’re doing is a ‘boycott.’ But whatever they call it, I think it’s great. It’s a big Internet, so I hope they find what they’re looking for.”

The conflict between Obama and Clinton supporters has already become bitter and ugly, and there is every reason to expect that things will only grow worse through the convention.

Bush’s entrenched opponents within the admnistration fabricate another sophistical analysis denying the obvious and leak it to the Press, and George W. Bush fails to answer them. Bill Kristol explains why the Bush Administration is again ducking debating the case against Saddam.

Late last week, the Defense Department released an analysis of 600,000 documents captured in Iraq prepared by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded think tank. Here’s the attention-grabbing sentence from the report’s executive summary: “This study found no ‘smoking gun’ (i.e. direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda.”

Relying on a leak of the executive summary, ABC News reported that the study was “the first official acknowledgment from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda.” There followed a brief item in the Washington Post that ran under the headline “Study Discounts Hussein, Al-Qaeda Link.” The New York Times announced: “Study Finds No Qaeda-Hussein Tie.” NPR agreed: “Study Finds No Link Between Saddam, bin Laden.”

And the Bush administration reacted with an apparently guilty silence.

But here’s the truth. The executive summary of the report is extraordinarily misleading. …

Take a look …at the documents showing links between Saddam Hussein and Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Apparently whoever wrote the executive summary didn’t consider the link between Saddam and al Zawahiri a “direct connection” because Egyptian Islamic Jihad had not yet, in the early 1990s, fully been incorporated into al Qaeda. Of course, by that standard, evidence of support provided to Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s might not be deemed a “direct connection” because al Qaeda as we know it today did not yet exist.

If you talk to people in the Bush administration, they know the truth about the report. They know that it makes the case convincingly for Saddam’s terror connections. But they’ll tell you (off the record) it’s too hard to try to set the record straight. Any reengagement on the case for war is a loser, they’ll say. Furthermore, once the first wave of coverage is bad, you can never catch up: You give the misleading stories more life and your opponents further chances to beat you up in the media. And as for trying to prevent misleading summaries and press leaks in the first place–that’s hopeless. Someone will tell the media you’re behaving like Scooter Libby, and God knows what might happen next.

So, this week’s fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war will bring us countless news stories reexamining the case for war, with the White House essentially pleading nolo contendere. Even though there is abundant evidence that Iraq was a serious state sponsor of terrorism–and would almost certainly have become a greater one if Saddam had been left in power–most Americans will assume there was no real Saddam-terror connection. After all, they haven’t heard the Bush administration say otherwise.

Newsbusters notes the discrepancies between the current version of the facts as defined by the establishment media and some previous reporting.

While it is currently conventional wisdom in the media that there was no Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq before the 2003 invasion, as evidenced by the media’s failure to correct Barack Obama’s recent claim that “there was no such thing as Al-Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq,” for several years dating back before the Iraq invasion, there have been media reports of former Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s connections to Osama bin Laden, and his use of Iraq as a base to plot terror attacks against other countries before the war. In fact, four years ago, the NBC Nightly News claimed not only that there was an Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq before the invasion, busy plotting attacks against Europe, but that the Bush administration intentionally “passed up several opportunities” to attack terrorist bases in Iraq “long before the war” in 2002 because of fear it would “undercut its case” for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

On the March 2, 2004 NBC Nightly News, Tom Brokaw introduced the report: “[Abu Musab al-Zarqawi] is widely believed to have ties to Al-Qaeda, and the Bush administration apparently passed up several opportunities to take him out well before the Iraq war began.”

And on the January 27, 2003 NBC Nightly News, after revelations of a plot to attack targets in Europe with the poison ricin, which was believed to have been hatched by Zarqawi in Iraq, correspondent Jim Miklaszewski reported that “U.S. Special Forces had plans to launch a covert raid against the Kirmadara complex [in northern Iraq], but Pentagon officials say it was called off because the Bush administration feared it would interfere with upcoming UN weapon inspections.”

Although some have tried to argue that Zarqawi did not declare allegiance to bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda organization until after the Iraq invasion, as far back as April 4 and May 16, 2001, AP’s Jamal Halaby reported that Jordanian authorities suspected Zarqawi, also known as Ahmad Fadeel Al-Khalayleh, of plotting attacks in Jordan, and relayed that Zarqawi was “believed to be in Afghanistan.”

On November 9, 2002, a London Times article by Roger Boyes and Daniel McGrory, citing Hans-Josef Beth of the German secret service BND, claimed that Zarqawi “used London as his base until Osama bin Laden ordered him to move to Afghanistan in 2000 to run one of al-Qaeda’s training camps.”

On December 18, 2002, after the arrests of several terror suspects in France amid fears of a chemical weapon attack, Sebastian Rotella of the Los Angeles Times reported that “A top Al Qaeda suspect said to be commanding a campaign targeting Europe is Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian reputedly knowledgeable about chemical warfare, according to German and Italian intelligence officials.”

On December 19, 2002, Knight Ridder’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reported, citing Jordanian Prime Minister Ali Abu al Ragheb, that Zarqawi was behind the murder of American diplomat Lawrence Foley, and was believed to be “an ally of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.” Ragheb further contended that Zarqawi “was probably in northern Iraq working with Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Muslim extremist group.” Jordanian officials were also cited as claiming that the men suspected of carrying out Foley’s murder met Zarqawi “in Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.”

Mike Gallagher applies the New York Times’s own standards of journalism to “the Newspaper of Record.”

I have two sources, both of whom wish to remain anonymous, that report to me that New York Times Editor Bill Keller was spotted in a dumpster last weekend in the Hamptons snorting crack cocaine and smothering a pair of cocker spaniel puppies with a pair of sweat socks.

So now I’m reporting it to you.

Wasn’t that fun?

Of course this isn’t true – not that I know of, anyway – but it sure was easy to get out my laptop and write those words down so thousands of eyes could read them.

Evidently, the “Old Grey Lady” possesses the same standards as a supermarket tabloid that breathlessly reports that “sources” claim they saw Elvis munching on a Krispy Kreme donut in Myrtle Beach.

Read the whole thing.

Dennis Praeger asks a few questions which have often occurred to me upon reading press reports of these kinds of incidents.

Question 1: Why are murderers always counted in the victims tally?

The day after the mass murder of students at Northern Illinois University (NIU), the headline in the closest major newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, was: “6 Dead in NIU Shooting.”

“6 dead” included the murderer. Why wasn’t the headline “5 killed at NIU”?

It is nothing less than moronic that the media routinely lump murderers and their victims in the same tally.

This is something entirely new. Until the morally confused took over the universities and the news media, murderers were never counted along with their victims. To give a military analogy, can one imagine a headline like this in an American newspaper after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: “2,464 Dead in Pearl Harbor Attack”? After all, 55 Japanese airmen and nine Japanese crewmen also died in the attack. …

Question 3: Why are “shooter” and “gunman” used instead of “killer” or “murderer”?

If a murderer used a knife to murder five students, no news headlines would read, “Knifeman Kills Five.” So why always “shooter” and “gunman”?

The most obvious explanation is that by focusing on the weapon used by the murderer, the media can further their anti-gun agenda.

The operational alliance between the radical left and the mainstream media was demonstrated in its most conspicuous form today, when a bogus exercise in propaganda by a collection of radical leftists (funded by the usual gang of wealthy poseurs) was served up as supposed “news” by AP

A study by two nonprofit (but highly partisan) journalism organizations (funded by George Soros, Barbara Streisand, and other less-than-disinterested parties) found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

and the New York Times.

Big Lizards explains who is behind this.

“A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations…”

The Fund for Independence in Journalism says its “primary purpose is providing legal defense and endowment support for the largest nonprofit, investigative reporting institution in the world, the Center for Public Integrity, and possibly other, similar groups.” Eight of the eleven members of the Fund’s board of directors are either on the BoD of the Center for Public Integrity, or else are on the Center’s Advisory Board. Thus these “two” organizations are actually joined at the hip.

“Fund for Independence in Journalism…”

The Center is heavily funded by George Soros. It has also received funding from Bill Moyers, though some of that money might have actually been from Soros, laundered through Moyers via the Open Society Foundation.

Other funders include the Streisand Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts (used to be conservative, but in 1987 they veered sharply to the left, and are now a dyed-in-the-wool “progressive” funder), the Los Angeles Times Foundation, and so forth. The Center is a far-left organization funded by far-left millionaires, billionaires, and trusts.

Selective quotations and old leftist lies (including Joe Wilson’s) are simply repackaged in an on-line database by a gang of “progressives” funded by the usual suspects, and this exercise in self-gratification is treated as “news.”

Tigerhawk notes the latest exercise in issue avoidance from the public’s supposed ombudsman Clark Hoyt.

The “public editor” of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, remains as ever unwilling to challenge the paper’s editorial leadership on questions that matter. Today’s column is devoted to defending Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse from charges from a conservative blogger that she has a conflict of interest when her husband — a lawyer — writes briefs filed in cases before the court. He basically concludes — and any blogger would agree — that the Times should be more transparent in disclosing conflicts or apparent conflicts. For my money, the whole column is a waste of ink — speaking as a blogger who finds something to criticize in the New York Times virtually every day, I have long thought that Greenhouse does a better job of writing neutrally than the vast majority of the paper’s news reporters.

The real question, of course, is why Hoyt spent his week defending Greenhouse against a cranky blogger instead of explaining why it was that the Times decided to devote its front page to discussing murder rates among American veterans without acknowledging that they are lower than for American civilians. Apparently we need another public editor to explain why the first one spends himself on trivia and the arcania of conflict policy instead of examining a front page story with statistical “reasoning” so unbelievably fraudulent it is hard to believe that it was not intentional.